Free The Ninth Daughter by Barbara Hamilton Page B

operated, bringing in cognac and linens and tea from France and Holland in flagrant disregard of the British Crown’s stringent trade regulations; gangs of thieves, too, pilfering goods from the tall English ships and slipping them out almost at once on the numberless tiny coastal traders that brought in hay and firewood, oysters and butter, from a thousand little towns along the coast. It was among the artisans, stevedores, and laborers of the North End that the Boston mobs arose, ready to hammer down Tory doors or launch themselves into bloody battle with the South End boys during the riotous celebrations of Pope’s Day.
    Though she would not have wanted to hear that Johnny was playing with the boys from this part of town—or that her brother Will was gambling in any of its many taverns—Abigail liked the North End.
    The gate to Tillet’s Yard was closed, and—when they tested it—barred from within. Coming around the corner to the shop, the Adamses found not the prentice-boys Abigail had expected behind its counter, but Nehemiah Tillet himself, a stooped and flaccid-jowled man who reminded her of a spider. “Mrs. Tillet thought it best,” he said in his whispery voice. His hands fumbled uneasily, straightening an already straight stack of his wife’s ready-made shirts. “Every lad in the neighborhood—and men of full years who should have better tasks with which to occupy themselves—wanted to see the place, and broke the lock from the door even, to go in. I spent the best part of the morning turning them away!”
    “How shocking for you,” sympathized Abigail, who had never liked the man. “To return home to find the place full of soldiers.”
    “I was very much overset.” He fiddled at the edges of the bolts that lay on the crowded counter: linen, cotton, Holland cloth. “Very much so.”
    “And you’ve heard nothing from Mrs. Malvern? She’s not returned?”
    Moist pale eyes regarded them warily under heavy, lash-less lids, then glanced aside. “No. No, she hasn’t.” Again his eyes avoided hers.
    And little wonder , reflected Abigail, annoyed. From the first time she’d visited Rebecca here, she’d suspected that Tillet lusted after her friend. This was no great surprise, given Mrs. Tillet’s aggressively unpleasant nature—for the past eighteen months, every time she’d come by to visit, Mr. Tillet had found some excuse to knock on Rebecca’s door, with advice, or to share some snippet from a newspaper or church business. “He’s worse than Charles,” Rebecca had said, more than once, exasperated. “He wants to know who my friends are, and whom I visit. I used to think Mrs. T. put him up to it, to see if she could squeeze another five minutes’ work out of me, sewing those wretched shirts the customers pay her for. The way he looks at me—” She’d grimaced. “I can’t well push him out of the house, since he owns it. And I would rather be here, and put up with the pair of them,” she’d added, when Abigail had shown signs of walking across the yard and giving Mr. Tillet a piece of her mind, “than go back to Charles.”
    Reluctantly, Abigail had agreed. Between Charles Malvern’s vindictiveness, and the general Boston attitude that a woman who left her husband must have done so from a preference for profligacy, it had been difficult enough for Rebecca to find a place to live where she might ply any trade other than prostitution. Sewing endless mountains of shirts for Mrs. Tillet and attending three sermons every Sunday at the New Brick Meeting-House were part of what she had to do, to go on living in her little house.
    “May we go back there?” John asked now.
    “There’s naught to be seen,” Tillet responded immediately. “The boys coming through after the soldiers, they’ve tracked all up, and carried away what they could, belike.”
    “Mrs. Malvern is our friend,” persisted Abigail. “If nothing else, we’d like to—”
    “There’s naught back there.”